Thursday, January 11, 2007

Game Night at the Condo

I brought a completely different selection of games with me this week hoping to find something that would click better. We did our usual floundering trying to figure out how to break up 7 players, 2 of which were caught up with Guitar Hero II.

Liar's DiceWe started with a quick 6-player game of Liar's Dice. I was eliminated first, which was fine since the pizza was almost there and someone had to get the door.

Merchants of AmsterdamA selection from my bag! This game is kind of an odd Knizia offering. It certainly wasn't given the "red carpet" of production values as was his due. The game played very smoothly, even with the crappy timer. I think the reason is that everyone is watching the needle, waiting for a specific value. So it's always clear when someone says, "Stop!" where they intended to stop it (we used the system where the current player always stops the timer). Can the current player bid on the current auction? Overall, it's a very good game. Each of the 3 different areas of influence work slightly different, yet they are inter-connected. Going for the monetary bonuses is counter to getting a majority. Good forces. We had one player only win a single auction, and he won the game by a hair: $1.46 million, $1.44 million, $1.42 million, $1.19 million.

RaIt's not often I play Ra face to face. We finished MoA long before the other table finished Caylus, so we broke this out. We used these excellent player aids, but they mess me up because I'm used to laying out my tiles my own way. The second round only had 5 auctions before the Ra tiles ended it. The main focus of the game seemed to be not getting screwed with Suns. One player was shooting for the high Sun total, but I managed to tie him. Another very close game: 42, 41, ??, 28.

BoomtownA light closer, which almost takes a little too long to be termed a filler. Still it played much faster this second time. The bidding was higher overall. I went for a lot of specials, but didn't end up with many mines in the end. One player scored more than 100. In our first game (last week), the high score was only in the 50's.